There are about 7 million things I need to attend to, but due to various life stuff, I haven’t been able to. And, of course, I’ve been quiet on the blog for two days. Horrors!

So, let’s talk about something fun: Tarot.

I’ve been reading various things about tarot for months because I’m writing a kids book for CatsCurious Press based on tarot. Yes, I know, this is the first time you’re hearing about this. I kept waiting and waiting to make the announcement and now I am just like: yes, book deal, moving on. Sometimes I can be strange.

ANYWAY, tarot books. After coming across more than my fair share of really silly books about tarot I pinged my homie Barth Anderson, because he wrote a novel about tarot. Tarot and a bunch of other crazy mythological shit, and you know how I love the mythological shit. The Magician and The Fool is a pretty awesome book and I’m going to talk about it in a sec.

Back to Barth. I asked him if he could point me toward some non-stupid books. We chatted a bit about tarot and crazy new-age books and sucklike. He pointed me toward one book, and in looking for that book at the store I came across this one: The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination. This book is interesting, particularly the history bits. I’m going to use a few of the ideas in constructing my story, yay. Reading that book made me want to read The Magician and The Fool again, because I was trying to remember how much of the history stuff Barth mentioned there. So, I did.

When I first read this book, I was totally hooked. For people like me who are totally into mythology and ancient mysteries, this was some serious crackfic. I liked it just as much the second time around, but had the same feeling that all the threads were not resolved to my satisfaction. Possibly because I want answers to ancient mysteries and care less about the character arcs being resolved. This is completely opposite from my normal reactions to fiction — this must be how hard SF readers feel about Spin.

After I finished The Magician and The Fool, I had a serious itch to pick up one of my many tarot decks. I went through a period where I scooped up a bunch of decks based on a variety of reasons. I only have two decks I ever regularly used, though: the Goddess deck and the William Blake deck, which is annoyingly obscure. I had to buy it from the dude who created it because it wasn’t available on Amazon at the time. I only use the Blake deck for artistic/creative work. I lost the book to the Goddess deck a while ago and felt kind of lost without it. But the desire to throw down was really strong, so I pulled the deck out and decided to see what happened if I just tried to interpret the cards themselves.

And now it’s as if I’ve always known what the cards mean even though I didn’t before. My brain is all inside-out!

I’ve done a few readings in the past couple of days and just as spot on as I used to be. (Yes, I used to be kind of good at reading.) This is very weird to me, and I can’t even explain why it is so weird. I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I crack the Blake deck again, because that one is even more mind-bending than “regular” tarots.